A key goal of almost any business, big or small, is growth. Several factors play in to how successful companies are in meeting that goal, including front-end efforts such as sales staff, vendors, marketing plans and customer service. While having a strong operational front to promote, buy, and sell, it is equally if not more important that back-end efforts such as ERP systems remain strong and are poised for growth.

Having a growing business is a great problem to have, though. As a business owner, it is necessary to make sure that your system can handle some of the growing pains that accompany that success. Among many other reasons to look for a new ERP system, companies may find that their current system(s) in place behind the scenes is incapable with handling the growth that is needed to maintain and increase success. Software packages such as Intuit® QuickBooks™, Peachtree Accounting and Sage 50 offer inexpensive up-front purchases which provide easy to use functionality for basic transactions and month-end reports. This makes them great for smaller businesses with simpler ERP needs. However, these solutions are more focused on recording transactions and accounting, and are not designed to be comprehensive operations solutions to be utilized throughout business organizations and company enterprises.

Unlike systems that are purchased and implemented with the help of a solutions provider, QuickBooks is sold as a retail product and is implemented by the business owner or an accountant. This is a great first step for new business needing easy accounting solutions, but as the company grows it will struggle to keep up, and gaps in functionality will become more and more apparent.

If your company is experiencing these sorts of gaps, NorthScope™ can help. The NorthScope solution was designed to support company growth and manage and/or integrate with all of your operational solutions. Some of the main differences between NorthScope and QuickBooks are that NorthScope:

Is designed to be integrated with proprietary platforms, not built on top of them

Has a much stronger security model that extends to field level security

Is designed to produce sales analysis in any way you can imagine

Supports complex rule-based accounting and accruals

Is designed to facilitate management of your company’s operations, not just performing data entry and producing financials

Doesn’t allow changes to historical data without a correcting transaction in place

Supports transactional workflows, allowing you to configure the lifecycles that each of your transactions go through from start to finish.

Includes over 1,000 features which QuickBooks does not include or support

Comes with features that, in QuickBooks, must be purchased separately, such as: Fixed Assets, Inventory Management, complex sales order pricing, and Payroll / HR.

Has functionality, where QuickBooks only supports data fields. For example:

QuickBooks has a place to set up sales representatives, but this is purely for informational purposes. NorthScope manages complex commissions for sales reps.

QuickBooks supports adding up to 15 user defined fields for certain categories, but again, this is only for informational purposes. NorthScope has the ability to add unlimited fields that are not only dynamic by product line, but also used for pricing, promotions, commissions, and data analysis.